How to Harness AdWords’ New Quality Score Data

In terms of driving clicks to your business, Google AdWords is one of the most cost-effective tools on the market. But like all Google products, you only have access to the AdWords data that Google decides to give you. This data can sometimes be frustratingly limited or tough to analyze at scale.

So, you can imagine how excited the PPC marketing team at Qiigo was when we learned that Google had added a host of new Quality Score metrics to AdWords reporting.

Quality Score is a big deal for anyone who uses Google AdWords. After the cost of your bid, your ad’s Quality Score is the most important factor when determining where your ad ranks. So, getting more data on how to boost quality score should help brands fine-tune their PPC marketing efforts.

Here are just a few of the ways this new data could be useful:

Google Adds Historical Quality Score Data

With this change, Google has made two basic adjustments to Quality Score reporting.

The first change is they’ve made some data more accessible. Three factors go into your ad’s Quality Score for any given keyword:

The expected click-through rate

Ad relevance

Landing page experience

Previously, the only way to view these scores was to click on a keyword and see the data displayed in a bubble. Now, Google has added columns into AdWords reporting so that brands and PPC marketing professionals can view this data more quickly and analyze data at scale.

The second change is even more exciting for PPC marketing professionals: historical Quality Score data. AdWords reporting now includes Quality Score data dating back as far as January 2016. This historical data includes overall Quality Score as well as different Quality Score factors, with data tracked day-by-day. That means you can view a detailed history of each keyword’s historical Quality Score, plus its historical scores for expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

How This Changes PPC Marketing

Brands and PPC marketing professionals will benefit from this new data in a number of ways. On a basic level, it will make viewing and processing AdWords data much faster and easier. These changes will be reflected in AdWords’ Report Editor shortly, so you’ll now be able to capture data at scale in a way that you couldn’t before.

More importantly, these new metrics give brands and PPC marketing teams better data for testing ads. Previously, you would need to manually track a keyword’s Quality Score metrics day-by-day if you wanted to test how a change in your landing page or ad content affected these metrics. Now, you can pull up all of this data in a matter of minutes, without having to record it yourself.

This makes it easier for brands to track how ad changes affect Quality Score metrics. It can also help your brand avoid uninformed, panic-based decisions. If you’re seeing huge fluctuations in bid prices on a keyword, you can now check if those fluctuations are linked to Quality Score fluctuations or if they’ve been triggered by changes in the market itself.